


Necessary Unpleasantries

by Variative



Series: Bar Fight [6]
Category: Star Wars Legends: Republic Commando Series - Karen Traviss, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Of Which There Are Many, horrible i know i know, talking about feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 02:11:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14154414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Variative/pseuds/Variative
Summary: The bar tilted wildly in neon smears of light, noises bleeding together with the pounding beat of Jaing’s pulse through his skull. He just lay on the floor for a while. Nobody seemed to really care about him bleeding all over everything, so he didn’t bother trying to move.Like, whatever.





	Necessary Unpleasantries

**Author's Note:**

> Anomaly belongs to [Jesse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starofwinter/pseuds/Starofwinter) <3

The bar tilted wildly in neon smears of light, noises bleeding together with the pounding beat of Jaing’s pulse through his skull. He just lay on the floor for a while. Nobody seemed to really care about him bleeding all over everything, so he didn’t bother trying to move.

Like, whatever.

His nose was _so_ fucking broken.

He stopped trying to keep his eyes open after a while, and then the bartender was standing over him, at a safe distance, smart guy, saying, “Hey, man, are you okay?”

Jaing groaned noncommittally. 

“I really don’t want people dying on my floor,” the guy said. “I’m just gonna. Call somebody.”

That got Jaing moving. He levered himself up onto his elbows and shook his head slowly. “Nuh-uh,” he mumbled, which was about as much as he could handle at the moment in terms of speech. Fuck, his head hurt. He sat up and gingerly touched his jaw, not even pressing down, but it throbbed angrily at him all the same. Molars karking rattling around in his skull. _Shab_. He probed at them with his tongue, the big one not sitting right, and it just crumbled into three pieces and fell onto his tongue. Jaing had to work to keep from swallowing the chunks, and then he leaned forward and kind of let them fall out of his mouth along with a giant disgusting glob of blood and spit into the palm of his hand, because he didn’t think the barkeep would stand for having bits of tooth all over his floor.

He got up and walked out, limped into the street, heading for where it was darker, quieter. He put his hand out flat and smeared his palm against the side of the building to scrape off all the blood and shit, chunks of tooth rolling out from under his palm, the little hard edges grabbing at him on the way out. There was a nasty ringing starting up in his ears, but he could still make out the plink-plink-plink of the pieces of his molar hitting the duracrete. Then the vertigo hit him, but he was already leaning against the wall anyway, so he didn’t fall over or anything. Score one for Jaing. 

Score, like, five hundred for everybody else.

Fuck, he was hurting. Whitejob shabuir kicked like a shabla bantha.

Jaing sat down against the wall and tipped his head back against it. He brought his hands slowly up to his face and let his index fingers rest against the center of his brow ridge. It was about the only place on his body that didn’t hurt. His left thumb touched his cheek, lightly, and that did hurt. He sucked in a breath and then brought his hands down about two centimeters and shoved his nose back into place, felt lightly up and down the line of it to make sure it was all on straight even as white lights burst over his vision and he tried and failed to bite down on a groan. It was done, though, and the whitejob fuck wouldn’t have the satisfaction of karking up Jaing’s pretty face. Permanently, anyway. He dropped his hands into his lap.

There was probably a motel around shitty enough to ignore the blood smears he’d leave on their carpets. Nice part was he didn’t have anywhere to be for about a week. No having to worry about fitting his nose into his bucket, or having to work those stupid fiddly catches on his pauldrons with busted-up swollen fingers. No having to avoid Ordo’s concerned looks. 

Jaing would take a week of bedbugs over that at the moment. 

Moving… was _not_ feeling like the best idea he’d ever had. Maybe he would just sit here for a while. Close his eyes for a bit.

_Or not._ Voices and footsteps were coming nearer. Jaing slitted an eye open, with effort, and saw the blurred gleam of neon on silver hair, realized that it was just one voice, saying his name with increasing urgency.

_Great._ Jaing let his eye drift shut. There was no rest for the wicked. None at all.

“Jaing!” Anomaly exclaimed, from somewhere close by. Jaing felt vaguely like he was floating, so it was hard to pinpoint Anomaly’s exact position. “ _Shab,_ what happened?”

Jaing growled wordlessly at him and blindly waved a hand, trying to push Anomaly away. _I’m fine, I’m fine, go away, I don’t want to see you._ Jaing would have preferred Ordo to this. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect: Anomaly grabbed his wrist and pulled his arm over Anomaly’s shoulders and hauled Jaing to his feet, unsteady and swaying under Jaing’s weight.

He cried out, mostly because he wanted Anomaly to drop him so he could crawl away and into some dark cramped space and suffocate there. But also because it really fucking hurt.

Anomaly didn’t comply. If anything his hold on Jaing tightened, and it was too much. It was just too much. Jaing halfway wanted to cry, and he hadn’t cried in ten years at least, or what he could still remember of those ten years anyway, since a genetically-engineered eidetic memory was just no match for mind-shattering childhood trauma apparently. So at any rate he just sagged helplessly into Anomaly’s side and tried not to let his breathing sound like gasping sobs or anything, and then he might have blacked out a little, because he opened his eyes and there was a popcorn ceiling above him and a dim light coming from somewhere and he didn’t know where he was.

“It’s okay,” Anomaly said. Jaing turned his head and saw that Anomaly was sitting on the edge of the bed that Jaing was laid out on. Anomaly’s hair was tied back in a sloppy knot, and the light that Jaing realized was coming through the half-open fresher door caught the falling-out strands of it, limning them like filaments of white gold. “It’s just a motel,” Anomaly continued. He was doing something with his hands in his lap but Jaing didn’t take his eyes off Anomaly’s face to find out what it was. “I was going to take you back to the barracks, but—” He shrugged and gave a wavering, unsteady smile. “This was closer. You’re pretty heavy, you know.”

Jaing took a slow breath. “Should’ve left me.”

Anomaly’s mouth pressed into a thin line and he leaned forward and dabbed at Jaing’s throat with a cool, damp cloth. Bly must have cut him with that bottle. In the moment, Jaing hadn’t felt it breaking skin, just the hard pressure of it digging and digging. Anomaly moved up, blotting at Jaing’s lips and chin, avoiding his jaw. That would be a sight in the morning. It probably was already. Between his split lips and the hole where his tooth should have been and his broken nose and whatever else Jaing wasn’t aware of at the moment, his whole karking face was probably covered in blood. Still, it hurt like hell when Anomaly started trying to clean up around his nose.

Jaing lifted his hand and curled it around Anomaly’s wrist, stilling him. He brought Anomaly’s hand down to the bed and let go of him, and croaked out, “Can you find me some ice?”

“‘Course,” Anomaly said, getting up. He reached out and touched the top of Jaing’s head, after hovering for an instant like he was looking for somewhere that hadn’t been kriffing tenderized. “I’ll be right back.”

After he left Jaing closed his eyes.

He’d really karked things up this time.

Jaing sat up, got off the bed and limped into the fresher. It was painfully bright, but he kept his head down and his eyes half-shut while he washed his hands at the sink, and it could have been worse. Dark clots of blood broke up under the water, swirled red down the drain. The splits in Jaing’s skin gaped open like mouths, blood welling up now as fast as the water drew it away, but his skin was clean. He took a towel. It was rough and nubby and stained, and he left it stained worse, vibrant red, gripping one hand through it and then the other until the bleeding started to slow. 

He hadn’t meant to hurt Anomaly, not _really_ hurt him. But hurting was all he was good for. Should have known better.

“Oh, Jaing,” Anomaly said. Jaing hadn’t heard the door. 

“Didn’t hear you come in,” he mumbled, not looking up.

“I have bacta,” Anomaly said. “You shouldn’t use that. You shouldn’t be up, hells. Why are you up?”

Jaing ran the towel under the faucet and leaned over, pressing it carefully to his face. He held it for seven seconds breathing in and out, and then dizziness swarmed him again and he let the cloth drop into the sink and braced his hands on either edge of it and let his head sink down between his shoulders. His nose throbbed. 

Anomaly was there, then, an arm warm around Jaing’s shoulders, guiding him up and back to the bed. “Here,” he said, and pressed a bag of ice wrapped in a cloth into Jaing’s hands. It was soft, too soft to be one of the motel’s towels. Jaing pried his eyes open and peered at it.

“’s this your shirt?”

“It’s my sweater,” Anomaly said. He guided Jaing’s hand to his face, and he took the hint and settled the bag of ice over his eye, the one that wasn’t opening as well as the other. Then he lay there and breathed, and Anomaly’s fingers moved over him gently, smearing bacta gel onto the lacerations on his face, his hands. The sickly odor of it coated Jaing’s tongue. At least he couldn’t smell it like this.

Anomaly finished, capped the tube of gel and went to the fresher. Jaing shifted the bag of ice to his other eye and hoped that Anomaly would leave. Of course, he didn’t. He came back, and sat down and started combing his fingers through Jaing’s hair, carefully picking out the snarls and the dried blood, smoothing it out. It opened up a karking hole in Jaing’s chest, felt like. A new wound.

“What happened?” Anomaly’s voice was as gentle as his hands, but Jaing was glad for the question, because it roused up that anger again, and he could handle that. Anger he knew. Anger he could cope with.

“Your commander,” Jaing said, laying it out straight mostly because he didn’t have the mental capacity at the moment to do anything different, “Didn’t like me leaving you in that fresher. Took it upon himself to—” He had to stop, take a few breaths before he could go on. “To teach me a thing or two. Fucking whitejob,” he added thickly, sneering. “Couldn’t even insult me right. Doesn’t know a thing about Nulls, thinks—thinks we’re some kind of commando class. Probably above his security clearance, _ha!_ Just glad my age doesn’t show.” Jaing grinned leeringly, even though it hurt. 

Anomaly didn’t laugh at his joke. Mereel would have laughed. Kom’rk would have laughed.

Jaing ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, pushing into the raw hole where his tooth should have been. “Can’t believe I let a standard put me down like that.” He barked out another harsh laugh. “Said ‘yes, sir’ to his face. Wasn’t looking so smug by then. He got one thing right about us, my vode would be karking ashamed of me if they knew I let a tame trooper push me around.”

Anomaly’s hand was still in Jaing’s hair. “Tame?”

“Nulls… Nulls are wild,” Jaing rasped. “Us and the Alphas.” It wasn’t something they made a habit of calling their brothers. Just him and Kom’rk said it, really, when they weren’t feeling so generous. For a moment he felt slightly ashamed of saying it to Anomaly, but it felt better to be angry so he was that instead. He peeled his lips back from his teeth, baring them in a rictus grin at Anomaly. “Don’t believe me?”

“You don’t look so tough now,” Anomaly snapped, pulling his hand away.

“Yeah? I still got some bite,” Jaing muttered, low and sneering, but he rolled his head over to the side, away from Anomaly. 

Neither of them said anything, for a while, and during that blessed fucking silence Jaing felt himself falling asleep. He was too concussed to do anything about it; it just took him steadily down until he couldn’t worry about it, until he stopped knowing anything at all.

# # #

And then Jaing woke up again and it was not very dark, again, and it was not very warm. Except for his left side. That was warm.

He took a few moments to get his bearings. Same popcorn ceiling, less light coming through the fresher door. He was warm because Anomaly was curled up against his side, his head shoved up into Jaing’s armpit and an arm flopped over Jaing’s waist, snoring softly into his ribcage. 

And then the instant of peace and quiet was over: pain fucking swelled through him. His face, his throat, his hands. Jaing carefully detangled himself from Anomaly and slowly sat up, and was left breathless at the seizing pain that lanced through his back. His head throbbed.

Anomaly mumbled and stirred, not waking. Jaing petted his side until he settled again, and then he reached over and took the pillow he’d been sleeping on, pulled off the pillowcase and slipped out of the room.

It took about five minutes of wandering around like the horribly concussed invalid he was to find the ice machine, and then it was three trips there and back to get enough ice for the tub. Jaing let the wet, cold pillowcase drop into a corner of the fresher, and then he went back out one more time, down to the lobby. 

“You have… mm, anything for headaches?” He asked the woman behind the front desk, leaning against it in a way he tried to make look intentional.

She glared at him. “I got ibuprofen, booze, and whatever’s in that piece of junk,” she said, hooking a long, sharp thumb at the obnoxiously colorful vending machine squatting in the corner.

Jaing got a mini-pack containing four tabs of ibuprofen, and he considered his options for a moment and then also got three 50-milliliter bottles of whiskey and a chocolate bar, and he went back up to the room, ran some water in his ice bath and sank gingerly into it, and started working on his purchases.

The chocolate and the drugs were long gone, the ice was more melted than not, and Jaing was halfway through the second bottle of unbelievably shitty whiskey when Anomaly came in, blinking around in drowsy confusion.

“What time is it,” Anomaly said blearily, and then his gaze focused on the booze and the ice cubes floating in Jaing’s bathwater, and he frowned, the cute sleepiness draining away like someone had pulled the plug on it. “What are you doing?”

“Self-medicating,” Jaing said. He picked up a larger ice cube bobbing around by his thigh, shook it off in the water to make sure there wasn’t blood or anything on it, and put it in his mouth and poured the rest of the bottle over it, crunching down on it with the teeth in good side of his face while the whiskey seared a path straight down his throat like sucking on larty exhaust. “Surprised you didn’t wake up, I’ve been in and out about ten times.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Jaing curled his lip at Anomaly. “You really in a place to comment?”

A tight, tense silence bloomed between them.

And then, “Are you angry with him?” Anomaly asked. His voice wavered a little, but Jaing looked at him and his jaw was clenched, expression severe. 

“Who, Bly? Obviously,” Jaing said. “I’ve already come up with seven different plans to kill him quietly and painfully, and three of them are entirely plausible.”

Anomaly sucked in a sharp breath and his hand clenched into a fist. “Jaing,” he said, his voice trembling again and his eyes glinting and wet, furious—

“You know, when Mereel says _vode an,_ he means it,” Jaing said, idly stirring a finger through the melting ice cubes bobbing around his thighs. “He really does love all his brothers, be they whitejob or commando or ARC or anything else. Me, I can count the people I love on my fingers. Not counting _my_ vode, the Nulls,” he went on, holding up a hand, “And I can count the people I love on the fingers of my right hand and have enough left over to fire my Deece.” He made his thumb and forefingers into a gun, pointed it at Anomaly and mimed firing.

Anomaly looked like he wanted to smack Jaing. “What _exactly_ are you saying,” he snapped, low and pissed off.

“I’m saying I’d kill Bly and feel about as badly as if I’d killed a Seppie. I want to kill him. I want to watch him die in terror and humiliation and the smell of his own piss, and I could very well make that happen.”

“You’d better have a _but I won’t_ on the end of that sentence,” Anomaly hissed. His eyes were very, very bright.

“But I won’t,” Jaing agreed. Anomaly blinked, startled, and a tear trembling on the edge of his lashes slipped down his cheek. Jaing looked away from him and said, “Just ‘cause you asked.”

He stood up in a massive slosh of ice water and stepped out of the tub. Anomaly didn’t move at all, even when Jaing reached past him to snag a towel off the rack, just sat there all pale and clenched up and blinking, more tears spilling down his face every time.

Jaing wrapped the towel around his waist and went out into the room, dried off his hair carefully and then lay down on the bed. The towel puddled around his hips; he was at least slightly not naked, and that was good enough. He put an arm over his forehead, careful not to bump his nose but low enough to block out most of the light when he closed his eyes.

It was fucking early in the morning, and Jaing was feeling the whiskey better than ever, so it didn’t take very long for him to slip into a doze. Noises came from the fresher and through the window, but nothing alarming enough to rouse Jaing out of the fuzzy gray not-quite-conscious place he’d drifted into, until the mattress dipped.

He tried to sit up, but a cool metal hand rested on his chest, pressing him back. “It’s just me,” Anomaly murmured.

“What,” Jaing mumbled, stupid with fatigue and alcohol, still halfheartedly trying to sit up. Anomaly pressed him back more firmly, kissed the underside of his chin and bit lightly at his throat.

_Oh._

Jaing relaxed into the pillows with a groan. “What are you doing,” he mumbled, lifting his hands and tangling them in Anomaly’s hair.

Anomaly pressed a kiss to his chest, burning hot against Jaing’s ice-cooled skin, making him shiver all through. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No,” Jaing said, before he’d made any kind of conscious decision, his hips trying to rise against Anomaly’s weight pressing him down. “Anomaly,” he murmured. “ _An’ika.”_

“Shhh,” Anomaly whispered, his mouth moving unbearably slowly down Jaing’s chest, and the low boiling anger, the fucking _humiliation_ snapped out of Jaing and he grabbed a fistful of Anomaly’s hair and pulled his head up hard, snarling, “Don’t fuck around with me.”

Anomaly’s eyes gleamed; he panted through his mouth and wet his lips, unreadable and unbearably intense and he said, “I won’t,” just as Jaing was starting to struggle not to look away.

“Good,” Jaing muttered, jerking his hand away and dropping his head back so he didn’t have to look at Anomaly. His chest ached, he had to remind himself that he could breathe, _breathe—_ the towel slid off his hips, cool small hands tracing along the hollows and making him tremble, and then Anomaly closed his mouth around Jaing.

It didn’t do him any good, somehow. He was too cold, or too drunk, and it made him so fucking sick and angry, lying there with his dick in Anomaly’s mouth halfway there at best. He wound a fist in Anomaly’s hair again and sat up, leaning over him, growling, “This isn’t fucking doing anything for me, come on, come _on,”_ this horrible desperation creeping into the edges of his voice. Anomaly’s eyes flickered behind the closed lids and he made a low muffled noise around Jaing’s cock, tensing up in his shoulders. He was frozen, hesitating,and suddenly Jaing was intensely aware of Anomaly’s tongue resting against Jaing’s shaft, his soft palate, shifting.

“Stop it, just stop it,” Jaing snapped, pushing Anomaly off him and recoiling. Anomaly moved, looking up at Jaing, hurt and confusion in his face, his eyes, and Jaing couldn’t look at him. He couldn’t.

“What did I do?” Anomaly asked at last, quietly.

“You—don’t, okay?,” Jaing said. He put his head in his hands and drew up his knees, pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes as hard as he could bear. Scattered sunbursts of pain flared. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Let me—let me, I’ll be good,” Anomaly murmured, his voice trembling a little, determined anyway. “I promise.” His hand curled around Jaing’s ankle, his lips brushed over the knob of bone. 

“Don’t do that,” Jaing said. He uncurled himself and pushed his fingers into Anomaly’s hair again and tipped his head up easier this time, met those burning eyes. It wasn’t easy. “Look at me. This is my fault, Anomaly. You don’t have to make up for anything. Didn’t Ordo talk to you? He talked to me. Bly beat me into the dirt and I went down easy for him, Anomaly. I’m the one who’s been doing the hurting, here. You’re not the one who needs to be making things up.”

There was nearly a head’s difference between their heights, but Jaing was drunk and tired and dizzy, so that was his excuse for Anomaly shoving him hard enough that he fell back on the bed, and for Anomaly swinging a leg over his hips and sitting, pinning him. He tried to sit up, and Anomaly grabbed his wrists and slammed them down over his head, snarling, “Shut _up,_ Jaing!”

It all stilled. Anomaly was panting. His fingers fidgeted on Jaing’s wrists, adjusting his grip. Jaing lay still, listening to his heartbeat and Anomaly’s heavy, rasping breaths.

“Lots of things hurt me,” he ground out at last, sharp and angry. “You aren’t special.”

“I sure don’t feel it,” Jaing mumbled. “But you still just tried to make it up to me by sucking my dick, so.”

“Fuck you,” Anomaly said. “I don’t know how else to make it better, okay?”

“Oh, sure, ‘cause you and me having sex sure fixed things the last time we tried it,” Jaing sneered. “I’d fuck you in the ‘fresher and leave again, but Bly would kill me if Ordo didn’t get to me first, and I’m too karked right now to even get it up, okay, so, trying something else. Can you blame me?”

“As if you know what else to do either,” Anomaly snapped. “Look how well you’re doing so far, Jaing, I’m _really_ impressed. And you’re the one worried about _me_ , you stupid shabuir?”

“What do _you_ want me to do?” Jaing snapped, and opened his stupid mouth and added snidely, “Something unspeakable, I’m sure.”

“ _Shut up!_ ” Anomaly cried. His eyes glittered, chips of ice or maybe fire, and he snarled, “I could slap you, I really could. You think this is _funny?_ You think you get to—to—” and he cut himself off and squeezed his eyes shut, and Jaing didn’t realize what the sensation was until Anomaly let out a cracked, shuddering gasp and another tear fell from his cheek and landed on Jaing’s chest.

It was so kriffing impossible to be angry with Anomaly in the face of that. 

“What do you want me to do,” Jaing said again, softly this time.

“I just… I…” Anomaly sat back and rubbed his hands over his face, sucking in a harsh breath. “I want this to stop. I don’t want this to be happening.”

“This?” Jaing bit his lip, trying to stop himself from being hurt, fighting against the instinct to lash out again in sudden, selfish anger. Of course Anomaly didn’t want him, didn’t want this, the prettiest thing Jaing had ever had a chance to fuck up and of course he didn’t want—

“All of it,” Anomaly muttered into his hands. “You. Bly. Ordo. I don’t need to be fought over. I don’t need to be coddled. I _don’t_.”

Jaing closed his eyes and then he said, “I didn’t want to make things harder for you. I wanted to help.” He breathed out and inhaled and said, “I know what it’s like to hurt. I wanted to help you stop hurting. It’s just all gone sideways.”

Anomaly huffed out a soft, humorless laugh, and dropped his hands, patted Jaing on the cheek. “I know.”

“Anomaly,” Jaing said, breathing slow. His heartbeat was loud in his ears, slow. He licked his lips, closed his eyes. “I’m a Null ARC.”

“I know,” Anomaly said, wariness creeping into his voice, his hands spreading over Jaing’s shoulders. He thought Jaing was going to say that he was dangerous or unhinged, too much for Anomaly. But it was worse than that. It was so much worse. 

“They made us to be loyal,” Jaing mumbled. It was hard to say the words, sitting heavy in Jaing’s mouth like broken glass, cutting him up on the way past his teeth, but he said them anyway, and the words followed each other naturally and so they came, clearer and clearer as he spoke. “They made us to _love_. Isn’t it, isn’t it _funny_ , they made us to be soldiers so they made us to love, unconditionally, without—without thinking or questioning, they _made_ us—I can’t love halfway, I can’t help it. I wish I could, I hate everything they made me, but they made me to be loyal. _Shab_ ,” he swore, viciously, and pressed his hands to his eyes. They were leaking, dripping down his temples into his hair. “I’ll leave you if that’s what you want,” he went on, steadily forcing the words out of himself even though it _hurt,_ like a real physical wound— “If that’s what you need from me. Just tell me, just tell me _how—”_

Anomaly leaned down and kissed him softly to cut off the words.

Jaing groaned against Anomaly’s mouth and kissed him back hard, cradling his head, blood pooling in Jaing’s mouth and smearing across their lips. He pressed his tongue into Anomaly’s mouth, half-rising up off the bed, kissing him as hard as he could again and again and again, and it hurt. It hurt his jaw and his mouth and his nose and his bruised still-swollen eyes, it hurt to need Anomaly, it hurt to love him, but at least Anomaly hadn’t made Jaing say it. At least he was here and he was kissing Jaing back hungrily, hungrily, and Jaing pulled Anomaly closer, pulled him in, and it was enough.


End file.
